Wilkie Collins Page 14
Bets were placed on how, and where, the jewel would be recovered. There had been nothing quite like it since The Woman in White.
The first edition of 1,500 novels sold out quickly enough, and a second edition of 500 copies was printed. Robert Louis Stevenson, at the age of seventeen, wrote to his mother that “The Moonstone is frightfully interesting; isn’t the detective prime?” Despite his initial enthusiasm for the book, Dickens’s admiration did not last. “I quite agree with you about The Moonstone,” he told W. H. Wills. “The construction is wearisome beyond endurance, and there is a vein of obstinate conceit in it that makes enemies of readers.” His dislike, however, did not prevent him from adopting it as one of the models for The Mystery of Edwin Drood.
The reviewers were not enthusiastic. Praise was once more afforded for its ingenuity of construction. One contemporary critic noticed that “not a window is opened, a door shut, or a nose blown, but, depend upon it, the act will have something to do with the end of the book.” Yet some reviewers believed that it was ingenuity and nothing more. The critic of the Pall Mall Gazette wrote that “in sliding panels, trap doors and artificial beards, Mr. Collins is nearly as clever as anyone who ever fried a pancake in a hat.” It was true enough, as the reviewers said, that Collins could not create “characters” in the familiar sense. They do not, for example, have the overflowing energy and vitality of even Dickens’s minor characters. They act as if they are on an invisible stage; they are a bundle of striking attributes or a repertoire of effects. They are not fundamentally real; they do not live or grow one with another. Yet they are entirely appropriate for the kind of novel that Collins wished to write. You cannot expect a novelist to work against his natural grain.
It was believed that the “detective element” disqualified the novel as a work of art, when in fact it opened the way for an entirely new direction in English literature. There had been earlier exercises in the genre, but all of them are inconsiderable beside the overwhelming power and authority of The Moonstone. Collins’s novel, since its publication in 1868, has never been out of print.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
A Change of Heart
At the end of his painful labours on The Moonstone Collins planned a journey to Switzerland in the company of Frederick Lehmann. He was staying with him in July 1868, in Highgate, and they decided to travel on together to St. Moritz. “I must get away,” he said. So they took the Antwerp steamer at the beginning of August; at St. Moritz Collins enjoyed the enchanting scenery and was enlivened by the mountain air, touched as it was by the breath of the glaciers and the scent of the pine woods. He would go on to Baden-Baden and then, at the beginning of September, return home.
Yet home was not quite the same place as before, since the presence of Martha Rudd in his life had already provoked new complications. At some stage of this year Caroline Graves left Gloucester Place and, on 29 October, married Joseph Charles Clow at Marylebone’s parish church. It would seem that the arrival of Martha at Bolsover Street, and Collins’s refusal to marry her, had pushed Caroline into another alliance.
On the day of the wedding Dickens wrote to his sister-in-law that “for anything one knows, the whole matrimonial pretence may be a lie of that woman’s, intended to make him marry her.” So it seems that, at the very least, Collins had come under a great deal of pressure. It was not unreasonable for Caroline Graves to seek the legal and social safety of a marriage. It may not have been a wholly amicable separation but it was one that had been agreed between the parties. Collins was present at the ceremony, and one of the witnesses was Frank Beard. Rendered more financially secure, after the will of his mother had been read, Collins may also have given her money.
Very little is known of Clow himself. He signed himself as “gentleman” on the marriage certificate. He was a man of twenty-seven, the son of a distiller; since another relative was an ale merchant, it is possible that Clow was also in the drinks trade. It is not known where the newly married couple lived. They may perhaps have removed to his parents’ house on Avenue Road, overlooking Regent’s Park. Carrie Graves stayed with Collins at Gloucester Place, as did Caroline Graves’s mother-in-law, Frances Clow. Carrie, who had just left school, was to stay on for the next ten years, becoming his amanuensis as well as his companion, until the time of her own marriage. A further change lay ahead. By the late autumn of the year Martha Rudd knew herself to be pregnant with Collins’s first child.
In the spring of 1869 he spoke of the “anxieties” and “troubles” that were attacking him. These no doubt concerned his unusual domestic arrangements, and he always said that the most debilitating anxieties came from distress “at home.” Could it be that he was distressed at the imminent birth of an illegitimate child? And could he redeem the situation by marrying Martha?
But his troubles may have also been in part related to his declining health. He had started a new treatment to ameliorate the effects of gout without the indiscriminate use of laudanum; he told Frederick Lehmann’s sister that he was “stabbed every night at ten with a sharp-pointed syringe which injects morphia under my skin.” It was hoped that the dose could be slowly lowered until he could refrain from opium altogether; this was not, however, the result. By the following month he was wracked with pain, and could only write by shifting the pen from his left hand to his right hand.
His mood was not lightened by the failure of his next play, Black and White, that opened at the Adelphi at the end of March. Charles Fechter had come up with the idea of what was billed as a love story in three acts. Set in Trinidad in 1830 it concerns the fate of a “mixed race” suitor for a white lady’s hand; he is first of all bought and sold as a slave but then, by legal technicality, becomes once more free and available. Exit the happy lovers.
MISS M: I live again. You are free! (takes Leyrac’s hand)
LEYRAC: No! (kisses her hand) I am your slave! (Picture)
The omens were not propitious. Fechter became ill during the rehearsals and Collins himself caught a cold from the stage draughts during the daytime. Yet the first night was successful enough and Collins was brought before the audience to accept its applause. The drama is of no great merit and, although it ran at the Adelphi for sixty nights, it often played to almost empty houses, and the provincial “run” was no more successful. One review mentioned “the breathless rapidity with which the most conflicting events succeed one another”; but this was always Collins’s style. He himself blamed the failure on the surfeit of theatrical productions of Uncle Tom’s Cabin; they had no connection with each other but the shared theme of slavery was enough to deter the public.
Yet Collins was never a writer who succumbed to disappointment, and soon enough he was beginning to “lay the keel” of another novel. At a time when marriage, or the possibility of marriage, was much on his mind he began to enquire into the state of the matrimonial laws. He was generally incensed by the fact that a woman had no right to control her property after marriage; in the words of Blackstone “the very being or legal existence of a woman is suspended.” So he began work on Man and Wife. “Yours is a common case,” a woman is told in the novel. “In the present state of the law I can do nothing for you…you are a married woman. The law doesn’t allow a married woman to call anything her own…Your husband has a right to sell your furniture if he likes. I am sorry for you; I can’t hinder him.” The wife is in effect another form of property to be exploited. Even as Collins was writing his new novel the Members of Parliament were debating what became the first Married Women’s Property Act of 1870, which offered only limited redress to the aggrieved woman. An article for Fraser’s Magazine, in 1868, had the title “Criminals, Idiots, Women and Minors: Is the Classification Sound?”
In particular Collins took exception to the Scottish laws of marriage. By a practice known as “irregular marriage” a man and woman could be pronounced husband and wife without the need for any formal ceremony or declaration. If, for example, they spent the night in a hotel or in an inn, they
were deemed to have consented to the union. A letter of intent, from one to the other, was enough to constitute a legal marriage. He quoted a contemporaneous judgment that “Consent makes marriage. No form of ceremony, civil or religious; no notice before, or publication after; no cohabitation, no writing, no witnesses even, are essential to the constitution of this, the most important contract which two persons can enter into.” This was the pivot upon which his novel was based.
He did his research in other areas, also, and was asking a friend for advice on physical sports; he was intending to assault the cult of muscularity that affected, in particular, the university men of the period. So he wanted to know how long young men trained for a boat race or for a running race. Would they come into contact with a “low order” of professional instructor, thus leading to “degrading social associations”? What kind of sporting slang would they use at a country-house party in the company of ladies and gentlemen? He disliked the cult of what was then known as “muscular Christianity,” with a passion for sports and a hopeless indifference to everything else. He was, in short, attacking the conventional English way of life and, as he put it, “running full tilt against the popular sentiment.” He had decided to compose it first as a play, and had in fact completed the first act before changing his mind; since he was dealing with delicate material he would be more confident in writing a novel than a drama. He was not quite sure how a theatre audience might react.
A child born outside the bonds of matrimony can pose problems of its own. The first child of Martha Rudd and Wilkie Collins, to be known as Marian Dawson, was delivered by Frank Beard at Bolsover Street on 4 July 1869; the birth was not registered. Yet he had turned himself into William Dawson, barrister-at-law, for the sake of appearances. From this year he paid a regular monthly allowance of approximately £20 to “Mrs. Dawson,” and also drew up a will for the first time. He had accepted all the appurtenances of married life without the ultimate declaration. This expressed the ambiguous status of Collins in the world, conventional and unconventional at the same time.
He had been concentrating on the new story to the exclusion of everything else, telling visitors and correspondents that he was “out of town.” The birth of the baby interrupted his regimen of composition and preparation, perhaps, since in the autumn of 1869 he took refuge with the Lehmanns at The Woodlands in Highgate. They used to creep past his room, when he was at work. One of the children there, Rudolf Lehmann, remembered him as “a neat figure of cheerful plumpness…not by any means the sort of man imagination would have pictured as the creator of Count Fosco and the inventor of the terrors of Armadale and the absorbing mystery of The Moonstone.”
He was a light and easy conversationalist. He told the Lehmann children stories of the famous prizefighter, Tom Sayers, whom Collins had often met. In fact Collins uses boxing metaphors in his correspondence which suggests that he had some interest in the sport. “He hadn’t any muscle to speak of in his forearm,” he told them, “and there wasn’t any show of biceps; but when I remarked on that, he asked me to observe his triceps and the muscle under his shoulder, and then I understood how he did it.” He also used to assist them with their homework.
The children also noticed that at Highgate Collins was “a very hard and determined worker,” a description eloquently amplified by his remark that “I am nearly fagged to death.” He went off to Antwerp with Frank Beard for a period of recuperation; he just needed the voyage itself to revive him. Before he left he informed the Lehmanns that he had dedicated Man and Wife to them; he declared himself to be “utterly worn out.” “I am so weak,” he said, “I can hardly write a note.” At the beginning of 1870 the “gout in the eye” had returned, and for a while left him blind and helpless in a darkened room. His letters were in this period dictated to Carrie Graves. But he had recovered by the end of February.
On the day he completed the novel, 9 June, he fell asleep from sheer exhaustion. He was woken to be told that Charles Dickens was dead. He was “shocked and grieved” at the news, but he must have sensed that his old friend was running perilously close to collapse. They were not in fact seeing each other as often as they had in the past. Collins may also have been hurt by the fact that Dickens had conceived a dislike for his brother; Dickens regarded his son-in-law as a burden and as a perpetual invalid. His energetic and vigorous nature could never have been very sympathetic to one who was perpetually ailing. Fechter noticed his glances at Charles Collins at the dinner table which might be interpreted as “astonishing you should be here today; but tomorrow you will be in your chamber never to come out again.”
Collins said that the day of Dickens’s funeral had been a “lost day” in the sense that he had not been able to do any work. It does not suggest any deep or enduring grief. He met the train carrying Dickens’s body at Charing Cross Station; he then travelled down Whitehall to Westminster Abbey in the last of the three carriages that followed the hearse. He shared the vehicle with his brother and with Frank Beard. The great years of promise and confidence had come to an end.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
Bags of Blood
In the early summer of 1870 Man and Wife was published by the firm of F. S. Ellis in three volumes. Ellis was not an experienced publisher, and Collins believed that he was damaging the chances of the book by not advertising it properly. He was also concerned that the outbreak of the Franco-Prussian War in that summer would damage sales. He was worried unduly. The novel had run in Cassell’s Magazine from the beginning of 1870 to the autumn, increasing the sales of that periodical to more than 70,000. The volume edition itself proved popular, largely because of its reference to pressing issues of the day, and two further editions were published that year.
The usual detailed and convoluted plot, in which Collins specialised, had a convincingly dramatic opening. The heroine of the novel, Anne Silvester, has been compromised by a famous athlete, Geoffrey Delmayn. But Delmayn wants to avoid the complications of marriage and persuades a friend, Arnold Brinkworth, to visit her in a Scottish inn where before witnesses they might be recognised as man and wife according to Scottish law. Arnold, unaware of the problem, then marries his own sweetheart. Just as Geoffrey is about to have Arnold’s marriage annulled, so that he can be forced to take Anne as his wife, a letter is found from Geoffrey with a pledge to marry her. This is the clinching fact in obliging him to marry Anne, who now becomes the object of his murderous hatred.
The villain of the narrative is of course an exponent of muscular sportsmanship, and thus gives Collins the opportunity to attack those who prefer their biceps to their brains. “We are readier than we ever were,” one character explains, “to practise all that is rough in our national customs, and to excuse all that is violent and brutish in our national acts.” In this respect, as in others, he is concerned to break down the conventions of Victorian male society. It is of a piece, in this novel, with the marriage laws that overwhelmingly favour the male over the female.
The English reviewers were quick to castigate Collins for his less than enthusiastic portrait of the English sportsman. But the French critic, Louis Dépret, wrote that “I have never seen in any other book the true youth of England so courageously presented.” A German reviewer said that “it exactly describes the great multitude of Englishmen who discredit England with their coarse, shameless manners.” The enemies on the field could unite in their detestation of those English “gentlemen” whom Collins also mocked.
Collins had been writing a dramatised version of Man and Wife at the same time as he continued with its serial publication, and the novel itself can certainly be conceived as a sequence of scenes. He relied upon dialogue and upon the sudden denouement, but it became clear enough in the course of his career that he was not an original dramatist; all his successful plays were adaptations of his novels.
He took what had now become his usual holiday after the publication of a novel, and on this occasion went on a cruise off the east coast. He also went to Lowestoft, and spen
t more time with the Lehmanns at Highgate. He wanted at all costs to avoid anything approaching literary work, and even locked up the paper he used for composition. In the autumn he travelled to Ramsgate; he had come to the seaside town as a child, with his family, and more recently with Caroline Graves. It is not clear whether on this occasion he was accompanied by Martha Rudd and their young daughter, but it seems very likely. In his next novel he described the diversions of the town, with its “monkeys, organs, girls on stilts, a conjuror and a troop of negro minstrels.” In a subsequent novel, partly set in Ramsgate, he conjured up “the cries of children at play, the shouts of donkey boys driving their poor beasts, the distant notes of brass instruments playing a waltz, and the mellow music of the small waves breaking on the sand.” Ramsgate had entered his imagination. He could wander to the harbour and hire a boat, or he could walk among the crowd of holidaymakers and admire with them the glittering sea.
Yet he was not one to rest for very long. He told a friend, in the winter of the year, that he wished “to hit on some new method of appealing to the reader.” He was, for example, interested in the notion of writing shorter novels. This would save some of the expenses of production and at the same time lighten the task of the overtaxed reader. At the beginning of 1871 fresh intimations of a story came to him. It was a most unlikely one, concerning the love affair between a blind girl and a young man who has turned blue after drinking silver nitrate as a cure for epilepsy. Yet one definition of his art might be the pursuit of a plot through difficulties. He took out his papers and set to work.